Most times when the system boots up, the Realtek icon is missing from the system tray and the volume is around 75% (loud!). When I tried restarting instead of turning off the computer and then powering up again the icon sometimes showed up, but the volume is always the same. If I lower the volume and reboot, it always goes back to the loud setting.

Thank you, Elvandil! I disabled the UPnP User Interface as described in the article at techzonez.com and the icon (and a couple of others) appears after each boot.

The problem that still occurs is that if I lower the volume setting, it jumps back to the initial (loud) value (around 75%) at shutdown and is at that high setting after each boot. I can hear it's loud at shutdown because the Windows logon sound is at a high volume.

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